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A LOYAL LOVE 



BY 



ELEANOR ATKINSON 

I Author of "Greyfriar's Bobby" 

I 




RICHARD G. BADGER 

The Gorham Press 
BOSTON 



Copyright igi2 by Richard G. Badger 
All Rights Reserved 



Copyright IQIO by The Curtis Publishing Co. 











#■ 



The Gorham Press, Boston, U. S. A. 



©CU328337 




i A 



A LOYAL LOVE 






s. 



M 



A LOYAL LOVE 

CHAPTER I 

IF one could but look into the gar- 
den of The Priory, in October, 
1802, the year and month 
that Robert Emmet came 
back to Ireland from long exile in 
France ! It was at The Priory that he 
found Sarah Curran grown, in his 
absence, from a schoolgirl to young 
womanhood, with her heart, as yet, a 
virgin page on which no name was 
written. 

An unpretentious house, in a few 
acres of lawn, orchard and formal gar- 



A LOYAL LOVE 

den, was this country seat of Curran, 
wit and orator of the Irish bar; but 
it was set picturesquely at the fir and 
larch screened entrance to a lonely 
glen, on the lower slope of Dublin 
mountains. No curious wayfarer 
might look into the inclosure, but 
from within, over the yellow stone- 
crop that gilded the top of the gray 
wall, there was a wide and charming 
prospect of land and sea. Across the 
flats below, the dim, fog and smoke 
canopied city of Dublin lay on the 
crescent of the bay, with its white- 
winged shipping and its guardian light 
of the Hill of Howth. Southward 
a higher range of the wild Wicklow 
mountains marked a horizon; but 
here, in the circling sweep of low, bil- 
lowy ridges, many thatch-roofed vil- 

8 



A LOYAL LOVE 

lages, pleasant country estates, and 
the medieval towers of Rathfarnham 
castle lay sheltered. From that gar- 
den no vista was more peaceful and 
sweet than that of the little river Dod- 
der. It foamed down the declivity, 
skirted the walls of The Priory and 
the last crags below, and took its 
capricious way eastward across the 
meadows to Donnybrook and Mill- 
town, thence northward to the city 
into the insalubrious flood of the 
Liffey. The path, worn smooth along 
its high grassy bank by generations of 
loitering peasant lovers, led from The 
Casino, the retreat of Emmet's father, 
at Milltown, to the tryst with Sarah 
Curran, in the garden of The Priory, 

This precious small demesne, hal- 
lowed now by memories of that na- 

9 



A LOYAL LOVE 

tional tragedy of patriotism and love, 
was, as Curran once said of it, "a 
little toilet-room in creation where a 
gentleman might shave and dress for 
eternity." Curran loved the place, 
won by hard bouts with fortune, as 
only such an emotional nature as his 
could love. He lived in the garden 
every hour he might, never tired of the 
lovely changes of the landscape, from 
dawn till dusk, from season to season. 
And there he kept secluded from the 
world, like a jewel in a casket, — a 
jewel in which he had pride, no doubt, 
but of whose worth he seemed care- 
less or unaware, — the dark-eyed, 
motherless young daughter, whose 
heart was laid a sacrifice on the old, 
old altar of Irish liberty. 



10 




CHAPTER II 



NEVER could The Priory have 
been more enchanting than 
in that month of October, 
1802, when every inmate of 
it awaited the return of the master 
from a visit to Paris. Sun and center 
around which everything else re- 
volved, the life of the place seemed sus- 
pended without him. Only the week 
before he had written his son Richard, 
saying wittily that he had had little 
for dinner beside the bill, and to tell 
Sarah he had not forgotten her. Won- 
derful that he had not forgotten her, 
amid all the social attentions that had 

11 



A LOYAL LOVE 

been showered on him in the French 
capital. Doubtless he had dined with 
Napoleon and Talleyrand — lucky mor- 
tals — and would have a sparkling 
flood of anecdote and description, droll- 
ery and pathos, to make an evening 
all laughter and poetry and tears for 
the worshipful little home circle at 
The Priory. 

After the "two dishes at five o'clock 
sharp," they would go into the garden 
for the long hours of northern twilight. 
Sarah was glad her father was coming 
home before this season of St. Martin's 
summer, that he loved, should give way 
to the fogs and rains of November. 
It would be quite perfect there, under 
the amber banners of the chestnuts 
and beeches on the lawn, with banks 
of purple of the heather and fairy gold 

12 



A LOYAL LOVE 

of gorse flowers running up the moun- 
tain slope to meet other piled-up banks 
of sunset. Of keen intellect and poetic 
temperament like his own, her brilliant 
father, and "this brave world that had 
such wonders in it," as yet filled all of 
Sarah Curran's fancy. 

But from much of her father's life 
she was excluded. From the convivial 
table and talk of that masculine house- 
hold, seldom without its distinguished 
guests, she must often have been shut 
out. In Curran's biographies she ap- 
pears not at all, except in that single 
casual message from Paris, and as 
brief menace to his fame and fortune. 
Then she is dropped from that record, 
the sea of oblivion rolling over her 
memory as if she had never been. It 
is difficult to realize that she ever 

. 13 



A LOYAL LOVE 

laughed and wept at her father's con- 
ceits, followed him with wistful eyes, 
loved and lost, and was banished from 
that garden. An ardent child, she 
lived on the fringe of his life, obscurely, 
almost unknown to the countless guests 
who dined and slept at The Priory and 
went away to celebrate the social gifts 
of its master. An evening when there 
was no company, and all those gifts 
were lavished on her, must have been a 
red-letter day in the life of Sarah 
Curran. 

Every afternoon, at the hour of 
closing of the courts, the carriage was 
sent into the city. From the doorway 
she could always see it returning, as 
soon as it had cleared the huddle of 
mean streets of The Liberties of Dub- 
lin and come into the open country. 

14 



A LOYAL LOVE 

Thence she watched its progress across 
the plain to the bridge at Harold's 
Cross, and up through the village of 
Rathfarnham. Now, as the carriage 
slowly climbed the rocky road, she 
could see Richard on the box with the 
coachman. That meant at least five 
guests inside with her father! Not 
even on his home-coming, then, could 
he bear to dine alone with his family. 

A sigh of disappointment, perhaps, 
as the vision of that golden evening 
alone with him vanished. But surely 
there was not a tear. Only a slip of a 
girl of twenty she was, but she had 
extraordinary courage and self-control, 
sympathy and understanding. "Mad- 
emoiselle seems to be a true pupil of 
Mary Wollstonecraft," is the comment 
the Home Secretary made on her letters 

15 



A LOYAL LOVE 

to Emmet, when they were bandied 
about among king and courts. No 
one knew, so well as she, the reverse of 
the medal whose bright side her father 
turned so gallantly to the world, — the 
ghost of lost happiness and honor that 
haunted that house of mirth at The 
Priory. The bright side was "Stutter- 
I ing Jack" Curran, the wittiest, dreami- 
I est, most rollicking and daring blade, 
I the most gifted and ambitious of all 
the scamps of Trinity of thirty years 
I before; who had married for love, and 
lived gaily on nothing a year, now 
prosperous, courted, and high in favor 
with the government. The reverse 
was a man who had been deserted and 
disgraced by the mother of his children. 
This was the bitter drop that poisoned 
Curran's cup of life. Unless it was full 

16 



A LOYAL LOVE 

of interesting and admiring guests, 
The Priory was a purgatory to him. 

Now Sarah directed a maid to see 
that fresh hnen was in the sleeping- 
rooms and the table reset. She her- 
self sped down to where the choicest 
peaches had been left to ripen on a 
sunny wall for the after-dinner dessert 
that was always served in the drawing- 
room. When the carriage drew up at 
the entrance she was in her place in 
the doorway to greet her father's 
guests. Slim and smiling, white- 
gowned in the short-waisted, scant- 
skirted fashion of the first empire, was 
this young chatelaine of The Priory, 
chestnut hair piled high above an 
aquiline face of surprising fairness, and 
shining out from it Curran's own soft, 
brilliant, high-arched dark eyes. 

17 




CHAPTER III 

ILLIAM GODWIN was often 
there from England, and 
Tom Moore, troubadour, 
son of a Dublin grocer, who 
already had London society at his feet. 
No old men were there, certainly. 
Curran's contemporaries had all been 
dropped from his circle, for the spec- 
tacle of advancing age, with its waning 
enthusiasms, depressed him. He him- 
self, at fifty-two, refused to grow up, 
kept his youthful figure and the face 
of a dreamer and roguish boy. The 
group about him was always made up 
of his juniors, picked up among the 

18 



A LOYAL LOVE 

talented youngsters who haunted the 
courtroom when he was to speak. In 
this group now was one who wore a 
detached air, as if the company were 
foreign to his mood, — that one-time 
young fire-eater of Trinity College de- 
bating society fame, Robert Emmet, 
come back to Erin. 

He did not look dangerous now, 
only serious and sad beyond his years. 
In person he was small and wiry, as if 
capable of endurance; his face lean, 
and of a dark pallor; hair straight 
and falling on a forehead high and 
broad, and brows projecting above 
eyes heavy-lidded, gray, and searching. 
His nose was prominent, thin, and 
straight, ending combatively in a sharp 
point. Intense gravity, grim earnest- 
ness, and supreme self-confidence 

19 



A LOYAL LOVE 

marked him. He was not a man who 
would add gayety to Curran's dinner- 
table. But now there was intense 
curiosity about him, interest in his 
views, and the manner in which he 
would take the new order of things in 
the Irish capital. Around him there 
was the glamour of romance of a bril- 
liant young man, who has long been 
labeled dangerous, and who has lived 
in a foreign land for the safety of the 
government. He was the center of 
the company that presently went into 
dinner — "two seconds after five, and 
Curran would not delay dinner for the 
viceroy." 

There was no time that Sarah Cur- 
ran could remember when she had not 
known Robert Emmet. In childhood 
they had all lived in the city, the 

20 



A LOYAL LOVE 

Currans in Ely Place, off St. Stephen's 
iron-railed Green; Dr. Emmet, phy- 
sician to the viceregal court, with his 
already distinguished elder son, in 
double mansions fronting the park it- 
self. Even as a very little girl she had 
an impression of the importance of the 
family, on every member of which 
nature had lavished talents. Robert, 
the youngest, had no more than en- 
tered Trinity College at the age of 
fifteen with Richard and young Walsh 
and Tom Moore, before he attracted 
the attention of the authorities by an 
amazing gift for oratory that was 
matched with daring to spread sedition 
among his mates. 

It was 1793, the time of The Terror 
in France. In Ireland fires that had 
long smouldered burst into rebellion in 

21 



A LOYAL LOVE 

1798. At any other time, in any other 
place than Dublin University, but little 
attention would have been paid to these 
ebullitions of youth. Other students 
said more than he, but Robert Emmet 
was a marked lad. His father was a 
fiery patriot who gave up all his pre- 
ferments rather than his opinions; his 
elder brother, Thomas Addis Emmet, 
was a civil leader of the rebellion, was 
imprisoned, and finally exiled. At the 
age of twenty Robert Emmet was out- 
lawed, a career in his own land closed 
to him, his generous and ardent soul 
turned adrift. 



22 



T 



CHAPTER IV 

"^HE rebellion was crushed. In 
his absence the Union was 
accomplished and the springs 
of national patriotism choked 
up for the next half century. If Rob- 
ert Emmet had been permitted to re- 
main at home he would have seen the 
hopelessness of an uprising at that 
time. But he had been in exile, and 
there were brave goings on in France. 
In Paris the struggle in Ireland was 
looked upon as merely suspended. But 
what did he find on his return to Dub- 
lin.'^ The national spirit seemed to 
have died. Even Curran, whose elo- 

23 



A LOYAL LOVE 

quence had rung in the old Parliament 
house, and who had defended rebels 
in the dock, acquiesced in the new 
order. 

They were all kind to him — his 

old friends. It seemed to be taken for 

granted that the years had tamed his 

tongue and taught him discretion. No 

doubt, at The Priory, he was advised 

^^ that it should not be difficult for him to 

y make his peace with the government. 

% The family had prestige and fortune, 

i^l and society would lionize such a yq- 

5:4 turned prodigal. It occurred to no 

''Hi 

U one, apparently, that Robert Emmet 
could have had any other reason for 
coming home. To him this talk must 
all have seemed fantastic mockery of 
his dreams. Here he was at this har- 
lequin feast of wits at The Priory, 

24 



A LOYAL LOVE 

where every one laughed at brilliant 
nonsense, sentimentalized over poetry, 
and speculated on philosophy; where 
there were allusions to the time when 
Curran should be elevated to the King's 
Bench, and Moore, with charming 
audacity, melt king and court to tears 
with his Irish melodies. Here Moore 
could play with exquisite pathos the 
ancient Gaelic air, "Let Erin Remember 
the Days of Old." ^£r 

Once, in student rooms at Trinity, 
when Moore had played those stirring 
strains, Emmet had sprung to his feet, 
eyes burning with patriotic fervor, and 
cried, "Oh that I were marching to that 
air at the head of twenty thousand 
men!" and they had all applauded him 
wildly. Now, if he were to utter such a 
sentiment in this softly lighted, chintz- 

25 



A LOYAL LOVE 

draped drawing-room of The Priory, 
where Sarah Curran appeared briefly 
to serve peaches and cream to her 
father's guests, all his castle of dreams 
would crash about his devoted head 
and bury him in the wreckage forever. 
Hot heart bursting with grief and 
bewilderment he seemed, in his diffi- 
cult self-control, dull and unresponsive 
to all these successful, officious friends. 
They no longer spoke the same lan- 
guage. If he told them anything at all 
it was what indeed was the alternative 
of failure to win freedom for Ireland, 
that he had come home to cheer the 
last forlorn days of his father. A 
broken household it was, flotsam and 
jetsam of stormy rebellion, that was 
living, forgotten by fair-weather friends, 
in retirement at The Casino. When 



26 



A LOYAL LOVE 

his father was gone he meant to join 
his brother in America. His words 
and manner were a reproach. No one 
was quite at ease with him. As he 
sat there silent and distrait, Curran 
could rise and say casually, "'Tis a 
sweet evening, gentlemen, and there's a 
hermit thrush in the glen. Let us go 
for a walk in the garden." 

Such was the insouciant stage on 
which was enacted that tragedy of 
patriotism and love, — Ireland's most 
dear and poignant memory. 



27 



#■ 



T 



CHAPTER V 

^ i ^HERE is reason to believe 
that Robert Emmet may have 
loved Sarah Curran in his 
"^boyhood, and had held her 
image in his heart during his three 
years' exile. Just before leaving 
France he wrote to Madame de Fon- 
tenay of the possible sacrifice involved 
in his taking up the cause of Irish 
freedom: "I must forget everything — 
that I had friends, hopes, tender ties, 
perhaps. I am not certain that this 
can be done." Now he discovered 
that it could not be done. He was 
only twenty-four, of ardent tempera- 



28 



A LOYAL LOVE 

ment, and natural feeling had been too 
long pent up. 

Did you ever stand in such a gar- 
den on a misty Irish night, all moon- 
beam and dew-fall, waiting for the 
song of the hermit thrush? One of thei 
few birds that mates for life, its passion 
outlasts the courtship season, and it 
sings on October nights, just before tak- 
ing its southward flight, as it sang in the 
spring dawns. Curran reveled in the 
luxury of every such poetic emotion. 
All voices were hushed in that garden, 
little groups standing about in the 
holly and box bordered paths, or in 
the grotesque shadows of old yews; 
Curran walking apart noiselessly on the 
turf, in the avenue of chestnut trees, 
face upturned to the stars, — "steeping 
his soul in constellations," — and then, 

29 



A LOYAL LOVE 

quick, indrawn breaths and involun- 
tary hand-clasps, as that wild rapture 
of love poured out of the mountain 
glen and flooded the night with liquid 
melody. 

Nothing in the universe then but 
youth and love's longing, and a natural 
overflowing of the heart in speech! 
Was she attached to any one? No? 
What hope was there then for him? 
He thought he must always have loved 
her. His heart was famished for home 
and affection. "Fancy long denied," 
Emmet has said, "painted visions of 
happiness on the air." 

This sudden passion, breaking in 
upon her preoccupation, was somewhat 
distasteful to Sarah Curran. She had 
been watching her father in pensive 
abstraction. He had wandered farther 



30 



A LOYAL LOVE 

away from every one, would wander 
there for hours, lost in that solitude of 
the soul that often overtook him in the 
gayest company. Finally, she knew, 
he would vanish into the midnight 
gloom of the grove of firs and larches, 
there to weep himself tearless over 
the rustic-marked grave of the little 
singing daughter — the gifted sprite 
of a child he had loved the best 
of all. Sarah, with all her love, had 
never been able to penetrate her 
father's armor of tears or of laughter. 
Nevertheless, she turned on this young 
lover in a passionate vehemence of 
loyalty. 

"Oh, no, no! There is no one for 
whom I would quit my faher." 



31 



■ CHAPTER VI 

EVERY love story involves more 
than the two central figures. 
It is complicated and colored 
in an infinite number and va- 
riety of ways, by other ties and duties 
that assert their own tyranny over the 
heart. Sarah Curran idolized her 
father. His fascinating personality 
eclipsed that of every man she had 
seen, and across this Arcadian stage 
of The Priory had passed the wisest, 
the wittiest, the most uniquely gifted 
men Europe had to offer. Not one of 
these guests had ever matched the 
nameless charm of the convivial deity 

32 



AILOYAI^LOVE 

who presided as host. Byron said 
Curran had fifty faces, and every 
moment in his company some new en- 
chantment. His eye all fire, his tongue 
all harmony, he had only to speak and 
every one laughed or wept or wondered 
at his infinite wizardry, marveled at 
the wit, the humor, the pathos, the 
wisdom, the whimsicality, the gay 
inconsequence, the mimicry, the poetry, 
that he squandered like a spendthrift 
but never exhausted. 

It is entirely within the probabilities 
that if Sarah Curran had been fully 
admitted to her father's kaleidoscopic 
mental and emotional life, Robert 
Emmet might have pleaded forever in 
vain. But the love that she poured 
out so lavishly on her father watered 
not the secret desert in his soul, but 

33 



A LOYAL LOVE 

returned to her own heart to be poured 
out again. As the winter went by 
she must have learned to look for 
Robert Emmet's coming. For many 
weeks he visited at The Priory almost 
daily. From the drawing-room win- 
dows or the garden she could watch 
his eager approach, his reluctant re- 
treat along the grassy bank of the 
Dodder. By little and little he re- 
vealed to her his powers of mind, his 
moral worth, his personal charm. In 
excitement his somewhat cold gray 
eyes burned; his face, ordinary in 
repose, took on a fine beauty; his 
boyish figure, a dignity and distinction; 
his uninspired speech, an eloquence 
that had won the extravagant predic- 
tions of his college mates. 

Nowhere had Robert Emmet been 



34 



A LOYAL LOVE 

underestimated or ignored. A youth 
of twenty-four, of no family that was 
known in France, of no profession or 
great fortune, he had gained the ear of 
Napoleon and Talleyrand. And with 
all his ardor, he had none of the follies 
and frailties of the youth of the day. 
Sarah Curran had heard her father pay 
tribute to his integrity; her brother 
Richard and Tom Moore, to his ex- 
traordinary talents, his intellectual 
grasp, and to the gentleness and purity 
of his character. '*So young, so in- 
telligent, so ardent, so generous, so 
brave — so everything the world is 
apt to admire in a man," as Washing- 
ton Irving has said of him, he could 
not have left the heart of this imagina- 
tive young girl entirely untouched. 
Every hour strengthened his love 

35 



A LOYAL LOVE 

for Sarah Curran. Her brother Rich- 
ard may have known something of his 
feehng, for to him Emmet wrote on the 
night of his execution: "I never did tell 
you how much I idolized your sister. 
It was not with a wild unfounded pas- 
sion, but an attachment increasing 
every hour from an admiration for the 
purity of her character and respect for 
her talents." She, too, revealed to 
him a mind informed and cultivated 
far beyond what was usual for a girl 
of that day. To her father's friends 
she was simply a beautiful maid, shy 
and sweet and unobtrusive, remark- 
able only for an exquisite voice that 
had been trained for her father's de- 
light. To Robert Emmet alone, in 
all probability, was revealed those 
graces of the intellect and the affections 

36 



A LOYAL LOVE 

that were fitted to crown an exceptional 
man's life with happiness and honor. 

On the rare occasions when he 
found her alone, sitting with her in the 
drawing-room of The Priory, in the 
short winter afternoons, listening to 
her singing Moore's earliest melodies 
set to old Irish airs, or taking a cup 
of tea with her before the flickering 
glow of a sea-coal fire, everything 
pleaded with Emmet for complaisance. 
His future assured, Curran himself 
would favor his suit. Employment 
for his talents, fame and fortune, 
peace and love at a fireside in his own 
loved country, waited on a word.^ 



But Emmet never spoke that word. 
Every tiny trefoil of shamrock on the 
bank of the Dodder pleaded for Ire- 
land and her six-hundred-year-old 

37 



A LOYAL LOVE 

dream of liberty. November and De- 
cember are the saddest months of the 
year in Erin. Then the veil of fog 
seems never to lift from the island of 
saints and sorrows. The very skies 
weep, the turf and hedges are drenched 
with rain, the beeches and chestnuts 
have dropped their tarnished r id sod- 
M den foliage, and there are splashes of 
I red everywhere — red seed-pods of 
I eglantine trailing from the crags, red 
. berries on the hawthorn and holly, and 
<| thick scarlet clusters on the rowan 
1 tree — as if the last carnage had spat- 
tered blood on a spent and weeping 
land. If Sarah Curran's heart was 
preoccupied, Robert Emmet's was torn 
by contending passions. 



38 



CHAPTER VII 

IN December, Dr. Robert Emmet, 
one-time physician to the vice- 
regal court of DubHn, died. Im- 
mediately the household at The 
Casino was broken up, and Robert 
Emmet was homeless. There was a 
notice on the gatepost of The Casino 
that this attractive country place was 
for sale. The house was kept in order 
by a young peasant girl, Anne Devlin, 
who had long been in the service of the 
family. At certain hours of the day 
she sat in the lodge by the gate, in the 
neat black gown, frilled neckerchief, 
and mutch cap that are preserved to- 

39 



A LOYAL LOVE 

day in her portrait, to answer the bell 
and to show prospective purchasers 
through the deserted rooms. Left just 
as it had been used by a family of 
means, of cultivation, and of marked 
personalities, with a forty years' ac- 
cumulation of treasures, the house was 
a chrysalis, from which the soul of 
things had fled. 

Robert Emmet seems, for a time, to 
have slept there. He may always 
have used it as one of his hiding places, 
for long afterwards there was discov- 
ered an underground passage, leading 
from a sleeping closet behind wain- 
scoting, in a basement room, beneath 
the conservatory and on to a summer 
house under the wall of the garden. 
But if ever he lay hidden there, or 
escaped by that way, faithful Anne 

40 



A LOYAL LOVE 

Devlin never told. By spring the 
estate would be settled, and it was 
understood by Emmet's friends that he 
meant to take his inheritance of three 
thousand pounds and join his brother 
in New York. It was then that he 
made his second and last appeal for 
the love of Sarah Curran. Would she 
go with him into voluntary exile .f^ 
She had given him no encouragement, 
nor distinguished him in any way from 
other acquaintances. Again she re- 
fused him, telling him more kindly but 
none the less firmly, that she had no 
feeling for him or for any one that 
could make her wish to leave her father. 
What desolation! His father dead, 
his mother in a hospital and fading 
from earth, his brother branded as a 
traitor and seeking asylum in America, 

41 



A LOYAL LOVE 

his love rejected, Robert Emmet seems 
for a time to have drifted, a derelict on 
the sea of life. It must have appeared 
to him, heart-sick and lonely, but still 
unconquered, a sort of happiness to 
hurl himself against historic wrongs, 
if only to join the long, silent ranks of 
patriots under the sod of old Ireland. 
It was some time late in the winter 
or early spring of 1803 that he "found 
some business ripe for execution and, 
after mature deliberation, joined it." 
He began then to lead a furtive life. 
To The Priory he came at rare inter- 
vals. He had, apparently, given up 
the hope and the purpose of winning 
Sarah Curran's love, but he returned 
to see her, again and again, *'by some 
infatuation," as he said in his letter 
to her father, written in prison, "think- 

42 



A LOYAL LOVE 

ing that to myself alone was I giving 
either pleasure or pain." 

In these later visits he was re- 
marked for high spirits and an assured 
manner. He seemed suddenly to have 
found some absorbing interest and oc- 
cupation. Curran noted this shrewdly. 
With no ostensible employment or 
place of living, the boy was probably 
up to some mischief that would pres- 
ently get him into trouble. Con- 
nected with courts, Curran may very 
early have learned that Emmet had 
fallen under suspicion. 



43 



^»<';":TtS'«r.^™ .^.f 



CHAPTER VIII 

A SELF-MADE man, Curran's 
well-earned honors rested in 
** the good will of the estab- 

lished government. He had 
not lacked courage in times past. He 
had defended Irish liberty before the 
Union. A Protestant, and with little 
real sympathy for the rebellion, he 
had yet defended priests and rebels in 
the dock. High in social favor, he 
had scorned the society of the Castle 
set, — dull parasites with brains stewed 
in wine, — and had hobnobbed with 
disaffected talent, more to his liking. 
Because of his very openness, because 

44 



A LOYAL LOVE 

of his few political convictions, too, he 
had come through all these troubled 
times, debonairly and unscathed. But 
now that he was older, wiser, richer, 
and in line for a place on the King's 
Bench, it behooved him to be more 
circumspect. Curran liked this reck- 
less young enthusiast well enough, but 
it was imprudent to have him coming 
to The Priory. 

To tell Emmet to discontinue his 
visits, however, was an unpleasant 
thing to do. Richard may have re- 
fused to so insult his old friend and 
college mate. It would seem that 
Curran was totally ignorant of the 
reason for Emmet's visits, no doubt 
ascribed them to the attraction that 
he himself had for every superior young 
man in the Irish capital. This igno- 

45 



A LOYAL LOVE 

ranee, and his eonstitutional dislike for 
doing disagreeable things, explain the 
incredible fact that the duty of de- 
livering the message of dismissal to 
Emmet was laid upon the young 
daughter of the house. 

It never occurred to Sarah Curran 
that she could disobey her father, but 
how that hard sentence of banishment, 
that affront to two generations of in- 
timacy between the families, pleaded 
for Robert Emmet. She could not 
have permitted him to enter her father's 
house again, only to be told that he was 
no longer welcome. In April there 
were charming outdoor occupations 
at The Priory, so in garden hat, 
knotted under her chin, and empire 
morning gown of rosy-flowered cotton 
print, she must have watched for him 

46 



A LOYAL LOVE 

to come along the bank of the Dodder 
and turn toward the little wicket gate 
that intimates of the family could come 
through without ringing. There she 
met him, dusky eyes soft with sym- 
pathy, face flushed with running, to 
intercept him. It would not be diflS- 
cult to beguile him to walk with her in 
that wild mountain glen brimming over 
with spring. What memories — to 
carry with him to the New World — 
this stroll in the green-walled seclusion, 
under blossoming white thorns, with 
Sarah Curran! 

There, pleading his forgiveness for 
the hurt, she told him that her father 
wished him to discontinue his visits to 
The Priory. 

A moment of grave regard, of 
tenderness for her, of astonished com- 



47 



A LOYAL LOVE 

passion that such a task should have 
been laid upon her, his sore heart com- 
forted, too, that she could so feel for 
him. He feasted his eyes on her sweet, 
sweet look, watered the desert of his 
soul with her tears, and then he begged 
her not to be troubled about him. He 
had come, indeed, to see her for the last 
time, and to say farewell. He was in 
danger of arrest and might have to 
leave the country at any hour. 

Danger and separation! Surging 
up from her heart to her eyes — oh, 
immortal moment — the miracle of 
love at last! 

There they stood — spring running 
gaily up the rocky slopes, the tinkle 
and splash of hill fountains in their 
ears, the hawthorn in wondrous bloom 
and scent, and the hermit thrush sing- 

48 



A LOYAL LOVE 

ing in a delirium of love — these two 
young lovers, pale and shaken, staring 
at each other across the void of eter- 
nity! From that instant of shocked 
discovery until the not distant, tragic 
end, the shadow of death was never 
once lifted from their hearts. Love 
came to her when it was least expected, 
least desired by both, and it wore the 
guise, not of a blessing, but of a calam- 
ity. Exaltation he felt, but none of the 
rapture of the triumphant lover. He 
was engaged then in a perilous enter- 
prise, from which he could not, in 
honor or safety to others, withdraw, 
and in which he must have stood 
appalled to find Sarah Curran's hap- 
piness embarked. 

The plighting of such troth comes 
to the fortunate but once in a life- 

49 



A LOYAL LOVE 

time, a cup of joy to be drained to the 
last drop. But Robert Emmet dared 
not linger to make his vows or to hear 
her confessions. Ever afterwards his 
chief concern was not how often he 
might snatch from fate those stolen 
interviews, but how best he might pro- 
tect her and the fortunes of her father 
from any possible connection with his 
hazardous undertaking. Their love 
had no rights that were not secondary 
to other obligations, and if a grave 
opened at his feet, the secret of that 
love must be buried with him. 

The splendors of success and fore- 
bodings of disaster filled all their 
dreams. Their few brief meetings had 
all the magic of the incredible that he 
was still alive, at liberty, and there 
with his arms around her. Every 

50 



A LOYAL LOVE 

good-by kiss held the pain of the last 
parting. It was in their letters that 
time and space were granted to pour 
out their hearts. He seems to have 
told her everything. Whether he won 
her entire belief that his venture should 
succeed will never be known, but it is 
very certain that she never tried to 
turn him from his purpose. A girl 
capable of devotion to two such re- 
markable men as her father and Robert 
Emmet could understand that, to this 
lover, life and love without honor, 
purchased at the price of abandonment 
of companions in peril, were worthless. 
She could tie her maiden token on his 
arm and send him out to battle for 
what he felt to be the right. In her 
letters to him, that were taken from 
him on his arrest, she called him her 



51 



A LOYAL LOVE 

hero as well as her lover, gloried in his 
past and prayed for his success in this 
undertaking. Girded so, with love 
and faith, men have done miracles 
since the world began. Why not he? 




52 






CHAPTER IX 

VEN to-day the event is shrouded 
in much mystery. One thing 
that stands out very clearly is 
that Emmet was sacrificed in a 
movement that was hopeless from its in- 
ception. Whether he was made a pawn 
in Napoleon's imperial game, heartlessly 
encouraged to distract the attention 
and energies of England; whether he 
was trapped in a government net set 
for malcontents; whether the uprising 
was spontaneous, but weak and faint- 
hearted, may never be known. It may 
have been a mixture of all three, inex- 
tricably entangled in evidence sup- 

53 



A LOYAL LOVE 

pressed at the trial. Emmet himself 
said that he was not the life and heart 
of that insurrection, but his superiors 
he refused to betray and they were 
never discovered. He "found some 
business ripe for execution and joined 
it." He repudiated the charge that he 
was an emissary of France, but he had 
been given to understand in Paris that 
Napoleon meant to strike some blow 
at England in August, 1803, and Eng- 
land's extremity was Ireland's oppor- 
tunity to win her own freedom. The 
1 task allotted to Emmet was the taking 
of Dublin Castle and Pigeon House 
Fort. 

The firing of rockets was to bring 
armed recruits from Wicklow and Kil- 
dare. Emmet's part of the uprising 
was the only one that materialized. 

54 



rJ-^ 



A LOYAL LOVE 

He came out into the open, protecting 
every one but himself. On the pleas- 
ant summer evening when, surrounded 
and betrayed, he made his desperate 
sally out of Marshalsea Lane, he said, 
*'If I fail, there will be only one man to 
crush." 

Either the danger that threatened 
Emmet in the spring lessened, or he 
escaped arrest by taking greater pre- 
cautions. In April he disappeared. It 
was thought by his friends that he had 
left the country. But under an as- 
sumed name he had taken a farm- 
house, hidden away in Butterfield Lane, 
behind the village of Rathfarnham, 
and looking along the slope of the moun- 
tain to The Priory. From this retreat, 
known only to two men, he directed 
the manufacture and collection of arms 

55 



A LOYAL LOVE 

and ammunition in two depots in The 
Liberties, sinking all his patrimony in 
the venture. Day and night Sarah 
Curran's window in the gable of The 
Priory was in plain view. From her 
casement came many a signal — the 
flutter of a kerchief, the light of a 
candle; and some similar signal, dis- 
played at the farmhouse, reassured 
her of his safety. "I did hold the re- 
moval of her anxiety above every 
other consideration — not to leave her 
uncertain of my situation," Emmet 
wrote to her father. 



56 




. CHAPTER X 

THE summer crept on — May, 
''^ June, and up to mid- July. 
In August, Napoleon in the 
Channel and the green flag 
on Dublin Castle! For three months 
this story of patriotism and sacrificial 
love was sustained on a heroic level. 
From danger the weak soul shrinks, 
dissolves in tremors and tears. Many 
who can face sudden peril with sufficient 
courage break under long strain. Only 
souls draped in purple can sit, lips 
red and smiling, under a sword of 
Damocles. Every hour of that long 
summer Emmet was in danger of dis- 

57 



A LOYAL I,OVE 

CO very; every hour of it dragged its 
slow length through trivial household 
and social duties for Sarah Curran. 
He had his work to occupy and sustain 
him, but she dared not even weep. 
Through all those weeks of suspense, 
no restlessness, anxiety, or change in 
her little round of habits betrayed her. 
Anne Devlin, who slipped over 
from The Casino to attend to Emmet's 
few wants at the farmhouse, could 
have gone to The Priory freely, to visit 
acquaintances in the servants' hall, 
and she was, in all probability, the 
bearer of the letters between the lovers. 
If she did this for them she never told, 
as she told nothing else. Her loyalty 
added to Emmet's difficulties in the 
end. Such faith may be repaid only 
in kind. 



A LOYAL LOVE 

One hopes that Sarah Curran saw 
her lover at least once in the green and 
white and gold uniform, gold epaulets, 
plumed hat, and sword, in which he 
dashed out of Marshalsea Lane to lead 
a cause foredoomed to failure. It is 
thus all Ireland remembers him to-day ; 
the way in which he is pictured in crude 
lithographs that hang in countless Irish 
cabins. In that garb of the patriot, 
worn at a time when they were hanging 
men for the wearing of the green; in 
his stainless young manhood, his be- 
neficent plans for republican govern- 
ment, his enthusiasm and high hope, he 
must have appeared to her a veritable 
Sir Galahad. And where is the girl 
who can love like the maid of Erin, — 
tender, trusting, ardent, material; all 
blushes and fond kisses and brooding 

59 



A LOYAL LOVE 

tears, to set the brain and the heart of 
him on fire. And his eloquence — fuel 
to those flames in her breast! We 
have but one example of Emmet's 
oratory, but that is the noblest speech 
ever delivered from the dock by a man 
condemned to the gallows, a deathless 
oration that eclipses Curran's forty 
years at the Irish bar. To such as 
these two, life and love have a poignant 
sweetness that the less endowed may 
never know. It was thus they parted 
for the last time, life and love and high 
endeavor, such warm and pulsing things 
that failure and death must stand dis- 
armed before them. ^""i^HMBP^ 
There was a month or more to wait, 
much preparation still to be made, 
when the event was precipitated by an 
explosion in Emmet's Patrick Street 

60 



A LOYAL LOVE 

depot. The detonations could have 
been heard, the glare of the flames have 
been seen from The Priory. With all the 
city and country sidorin wild alarm, the 
signal light in the farmhouse was 
blown out. Sarah Curran's lover was 
gone into The Liberties of Dublin, that 
labyrinth of wretched streets, blind 
alleys, and crooked lanes, crowded with 
decayed mansions fallen into tene- 
ments and shops, haunt of the criminal 
and the outcast as well as of the poor. 
A treacherous region at all times, it now 
swarmed with policemen, spies, and 
soldiers. There he worked and ate 
and slept, amid explosives, his life also 
at the mercy of forty workmen, some 
of whom were spies, some purchasable 
informers. 

A week of deathlike silence, her 

61 



A LOYAL LOVE 

heart on the rack, and then — rockets, 
piercing the peaceful sky of that soft 
summer evening of July 23. Con- 
fusion and shots, and again alarm 
spreading across the country — cottage 
doors flaring open, startled notes of 
interrogation of the dusk, and dim 
figures of men running down all the 
roads ! 



62 



CHAPTER XI 

"^ ARAH CURRAN at her casement 
window, counting the seconds 
in heart throbs, could not know 
that everything had gone wrong 
all day, that there had been misunder- 
standing, betrayal, and a falling away 
of the faint-hearted; that discovery 
was imminent, and the blow forced pre- 
maturely. In fancy she followed her 
lover at the head of an armed host, 
storming the Castle. She could not 
know that all the furies had been let 
loose, that this was not revolution — 
disciplined men fighting armed foes for 
a principle — but the sudden gathering 

63 



A LOYAL LOVE 

of a lawless mob bent on pillage and 
murder. While assassination and loot 
held horrid carnival in The Liberties, 
while torches searched foul hallways 
and noisome closes, cavalry charged 
the rioters and cannon shots ringed 
the Castle and barracks, Emmet and a 
dozen companions had thrown down 
their unstained arms and fled in horror, 
slipping through obscure back lanes in 
their conspicuous uniforms. At eleven 
o'clock Emmet gained the Rathfarnham 
farmhouse and flashed a signal to Sarah 
Curran. 

Victory! But the light was so 
swiftly extinguished that it might have 
been a firefly. The confusion in the 
city continued until midnight. Still 
fighting, and he not there! Oh, what 
did it mean.'^ Mounted troops, British 

64 



A LOYAL LOVE 

cavalry, came out to patrol the roads 
and to pursue flying men. And now, 
across the fields and along hedges, there 
slipped a figure that crouched and ran 
and vanished in the shadow of The 
Priory wall. For an instant he stood 
out in the moonlight in all his bravery 
of green and white and gold, lifted his 
hat to her dim silhouette at the win- 
dow, bent his head in deepest dejec- 
tion, and was gone into the mountain 
glen. 

Failure! A fugitive! Oh, no mat- 
ter; nothing mattered, since he was 
alive and safe in the mountains! True 
pupil of Mary Wollstonecraft as she 
was, better than revolutions, Sarah 
Curran knew and trusted the ways of 
these dear home mountains. She could 
follow every footstep of her lover 

65 



A LOYAL LOVE 

now, up the narrow glen, knee-deep in 
bracken; up the ferny rock-slope can- 
opied with foliage against betraying 
moonlight. There he could drink from 
some holy well, ringed round with 
charmed life; seek sanctuary in some 
fairy -protected cave. In the morning 
he could follow the watercourse up to 
the fall, slipping through hazel thickets 
along the ledges; climb through dark 
groves of conifers and plantations of 
birch and rowan trees; mount broad 
slopes of heather and gorse and crim- 
son foxgloves, strewn with great boul- 
ders, and scale some granite cliff by deep- 
rooted pines and cable-like trailers. 
By noon of the next day he could stand 
on that bald, cairn-crowned, melan- 
choly dome, himself unseen, and see a 
redcoat five miles away on every side. 

66 



A LOYAL LOVE 

It was a retreat that Anne Devlin 
knew, and the rough way had no diffi- 
culties that her strong young peasant 
body could not overcome. Some 
heartening message could be got to him 
there, some — oh, she knew that this 
was exile or death, and here was the 
man for whom she must quit her father. 
The wilder blue mountains of Wicklow 
lay to the south, to be gained through 
high passes and narrow valleys, and a 
boat, sails set, waited in the harbor of 
Wexford to bear him away to France. 

Her mountains would guard her 
lover. He was safer now than in any 
moment since the plighting of their 
troth in April. The dark head slipped 
to the pillow to dream of happier days. 
Some day, in some way, a green little 
home in the back settlements of 

67 



A LOYAL LOVE 

America was to be the blessed end of 
all their tortuous journeyings. 




68 



'^ CHAPTER XII 

SARAH CURRAN could face her 
little world with a blither heart, 
in the morning hear Emmet's 
name spoken in every tone of 
astonishment, execration, and compas- 
sion, too, that one so young and gifted 
should have been so ill-advised. She 
could watch scarlet-coated cavalry 
scour the country, with never a glance 
from them at Curran's unimpeachable 
little demesne. Anne Devlin went up 
to Emmet's hiding place once to take 
letters and plain clothing, but did not 
venture again. "Only one man to 
crush," and all the machinery of a 

69 



A LOYAL LOVE 

powerful government set in motion to 
do it, — marching regiments, patrolling 
coasts, honeycombing the region with 
secret police, and torturing a simple 
serving-maid. 

A clue, got from some unfortunate 
fellow conspirator who had been cap- 
tured, and there was a descent upon the 
Rathfarnham farmhouse, the car of 
Juggernaut rolling over Anne Devlin. 
She was offered a thousand pounds to 
betray Emmet's retreat. She was 
hanged from the shafts of a tipped-up 
cart, left for dead, hanged again, 
threatened with nameless maltreat- 
ment, and finally thrown into Kilmain- 
ham jail. But gold could not bribe, 
torture wring from her, nor solitary 
confinement break down her spirit. 
All the powers of a great government 

70 



A LOYAL LOVE 

were baffled by the loyalty of this un- 
lettered peasant girl. 

Such horrors ! Sarah Curran knew 
that poor Anne Devlin was innocent of 
any knowledge of Emmet's plans, but 
she could not speak a word for her and 
jeopardize her own father's name and 
liberty. In some way Emmet learned .^ 
of the desperate plight of Anne Devlin 
and of his associates. Many surmises, 
some of them foolish, have been made 
as to why he ventured back into Dub- 
lin, but none of them seems so in char- 
acter as that he could not abandon 
these unfortunates. Waiting until pur- 
suit slackened, he slipped down to the 
house of a widow who let lodgings near 
the bridge at Harold's Cross, intending 
to leave papers where they would cer- 
tainly fall into the hands of the gov- 

71 



A LOYAL LOVE 

ernment, and that should stay some 
threatened executions. There he was 
captured, so immediately as to leave 
little room for doubt that he was be- 
trayed by an informer. 

The news was not many hours old 
before Curran brought it home. At 
five o'clock it was still broad sunlight 
in the garden of The Priory, where 
Sarah Curran was accustomed to sit at 
a rustic tea table, some bit of embroid- 
ery at hand. If the world spun around 
her a moment, at least she did not 
faint or show undue agitation; and 
then a ray of light and hope pierced 
the black chaos that enveloped her. 



72 



CHAPTER XIII 

HER father was to defend him! 
Little wizard, Curran had 
got off many a "traitor" 
who deserved hanging ! 
"Brave?" she asked. Oh, yes, fool- 
hardy! To his incredible folly Emmet 
now added stubborn silence, took all 
the blame on himself, and was trying 
to bargain for the release of some of 
the accused. It seemed, too, that this 
serious youth was romantic. He had 
fought his captors like a demon, but 
two love letters, unsigned, had been 
taken from him. Very remarkable 
letters, from the reports. He, Emmet's 

73 



A LOYAL LOVE 

counsel, was not permitted to see them. 
Mademoiselle Inconnue was fully in 
Emmet's confidence, and had brains 
that she would better have put to 
better use than meddling with sedition. 
No stone would be left unturned to 
discover the writer. They had been 
passed around, and were now the sub- 
ject of ribald jests of soldiers and jailers. 
She still sat there in the garden 
when her father and his guests went 
in to dinner. It would not be entirely 
dark before nine o'clock. In those 
long days of northern summer there 
were so many hours of dawn and twi- 
light, so few of kind darkness in which 
her fainting spirit might have respite 
of wearing this mask of polite concern 
or indifference. Perhaps, now, Sarah 
Curran did not want night to come. 

74 



A LOYAL LOVE 

As long as the light lay on the plain 
below, she could make out the fortress- 
like mass of Kilmainham jail, then on 
the southern outskirts of the city. 
While the light still lingered on the 
mountain top in pink and amethyst 
and gold, the shadow lengthened across 
the flats until the grim pile was swal- 
lowed up. 

On the arched pediment over the 
main doorway of Ireland's bastile is 
carved, in low relief, seven struggling 
devils, symbolic of the fate of those 
who enter. There he lay, her hero and 
lover, so hidden, so friendless, so re- 
viled, extremity of peril darkening 
around his head, beset with what 
traps and pitfalls for his swift betrayal. 
Her letters! A gasping sigh there, on 
the odorous dusk of Curran's "little 



75 



A LOYAL LOVE 

tiring room of paradise." Their love, 
how profaned! Of herself she could 
not have thought overmuch. But those 
letters were a new danger to him, for 
Emmet would barter his soul to pro- 
tect her and her father. Now that 
night was come, she might dare seek 
sanctuary to pray for her lover in 
mortal peril; to pray for strength, not 
to go to him, but to keep the vow they 
both had taken to guard the honor of 
her father. 

She made no change that was re- 
marked in her habits, but went through 
her little round of duties and pleasures ; 
clipped roses for the drawing-room, 
arranged the dessert, sang to her 
father's guests, dressed as he liked to 
see her, wrote the interminable num- 
ber of polite notes that were then ex- 

76 



A LOYAL LOVE 

changed between the ladies of country 
houses, served tea to callers, drove out, 
perhaps in gay attire, to attend garden 
parties, where all the talk was of her 
lover, his mysterious sweetheart and his 
probable fate. She could scarcely have 
slept through nights that were one long 
dread as to what new disaster the mor- 
row might hold for them. Often she 
must have longed to throw herself on 
her father's breast, and find relief of 
confession and tears. If he knew, then 
indeed he must become superhuman in 
his efforts to save her lover. 

But if her father knew he might 
betray undue anxiety for his client, 
and that would subject him to sus- 
picion. It was a nightmare of a time — 
the government in a panic of fright at 
the possibility of an Irish insurrection 

77 



A LOYAL LOVE 

and a Napoleonic invasion. No one 
was safe. Every avenue of escape for 
her lover closing, the coils tightened 
around her heart. In some incredible 
way this young girl bore that mounting 
anguish alone, might have borne it to 
the end, without self-betrayal, and 

/buried the secret of their love in the 
grave that opened at Robert Emmet's 
feet. 

In a fortnight the sensation of the 
letters was almost forgotten in new de- 
■ velopments. Then Emmet was be- 
V trayed again by some supposed friend 
to whom he entrusted a letter to Sarah 
Curran. Every page of Irish history 
is stained with the slimy trail of the 
informer. 



78 



CHAPTER XIV 

AS Curran drove through the 
gate of The Priory one morn- 
ing troops galloped out from 
the city and intercepted him 
on the bridge at Harold's Cross. A 
brief exchange of excited speech, and 
the carriage was turned and driven 
rapidly back. The house was sud- 
denly filled with tramping feet and 
loud voices — official accusations and 
indignant denial. There were war- 
rants to search Curran and his house, 
and for the arrest of his daughter. 

If Sarah Curran had one last letter, 
lying on her heart, be sure she burned 

79 



A LOYAL LOVE 

it there in the fireplace of her chamber 
before she went down. Her heart was 
suddenly lightened that she had no 
choice but to share her lover's fate. 
But her father they must not molest! 
That angry tumult of voices and hur- 
ried search in her ears, she groped her 
way down the stairs, half blind and 
tottering to a fall, the long strain tell- 
ing on her, in this supreme ejffort to 
save her father. 

Then she saw him. He had car- 
ried himself jauntily for fifty -three 
years, in conscious superiority and 
pride. Was this her father who stood 
there, bleached with fright, shriveled 
with humiliation, frantic to exonerate 
himself.? He would submit himself 
and his papers to the government, 
throw up his brief for that vile mis- 

80 



A^ LOYAL LOVE 

creant and abandon him to his fate. 
He repudiated his daughter, but he 
begged to be spared the degradation of 
seeing his name in the dock. If she 
had fallen so low as to hide evidence in 
his house — 

"My father — there has been 
nothing — hidden here — but my 
broken heart." 

Even then she would have thrown 
herself on his breast, but he warded 
her away with flashing eyes and spurn- 
ing hands, and heaped upon her bitter 
invective and cold contempt. And 
when she had fallen unconscious at his 
feet, he directed servants to take her 
away, out of his sight. He never 
wished to see her face again. 

He never did see her face again. 
She lay there in an upper chamber of 

81 



A LOYAL LOVE 

The Priory, out of her father's sight 
and hearing, for many weeks. She 
could not have been removed from the 
bed in which she alternated between 
delirium and stupor, but she was never 
again in any way molested. The au- 
thorities were satisfied that this love 
episode had no real relation to Emmet's 
conspiracy, and there is little likeli- 
hood that the government would, in 
any case, have risked popular anger by 
putting one so young, so lovely, so 
crushed by misfortune, in the dock. 
But the threat was undoubtedly used 
to make Emmet's conviction sure. If 
he had any chance of acquittal he re- 
linquished it. He offered to plead 
guilty to the charge of treason, to 
submit no evidence in his own de- 
fense, and to forego his right to address 

82 



A LOYAL LOVE 

the people from the scaffold, if Curran 
was relieved of suspicion, and Sarah 
Curran's name and letters kept out of 
court. So eagerly were these terms 
accepted, so carefully was the story 
suppressed, that Emmet was able to 
write his brother that his engagement 
to her was little known. It became a 
matter of public knowledge only when 
Sarah Curran was driven from her 
father's house. 

She knew nothing of that sad bar- 
gaining, nothing of that hurried trial, 
nothing of that noble speech which 
moved even the "hanging" judge to 
tears, nothing of the letters Emmet 
wrote to her father, her brother, and to 
his brother and sister-in-law in America. 
Those letters were all about her, de- 
tailing the story of that blameless, 

83 



A LOYAL LOVE 

tragic love, begging a little kindness 
for her, asking his brother to "receive 
her as my wife, love her as a sister, in 
case her natural protectors fall away." 
That letter was not delivered; and 
none of those letters was to her. Em- 
met may have understood that she 
might never recover her reason, for in 
his letter to Richard he said: "I have 
had public duties to sustain me, and 
have not permitted my spirit to sink, 
but when I think of her situation, 
death would be a relief." 

She knew nothing of that last scene 
of all! 



84 



^' CHAPTER XV 

r^lARAH CURRAN came back 
J^ slowly to a world where he was 
not — a gray world of shadows. 
^ Her little universe had held 

two figures. Now it was empty. Her 
image of her father had been shattered 
at her feet, and she could not recon- 
struct her idol from the fragments. 
Emmet's race was run, his lamp of life 
extinguished, his epitaph unwritten, 
his grave unknown. As far as might 
be his very memory was obliterated. 
That death, how frightful; that be- 
loved head, how dishonored; that 
name, how execrated! She had no 

85 



A LOYAL LOVE 

letter, no token. Of neither her father 
nor her lover had she any tender mem- 
ories of last partings, over which to 
weep her way back to sanity and love 
of life. There were no graves — only 
red shock and black ruin — her soul 
driven back on its own desolation. 

One short year had rolled around 
since her father had written Richard 
from Paris to tell Sarah he had not 
forgotten her. The gold was on the 
beeches and chestnuts, St. Martin's 
violet haze on that wide and charming 
prospect of land and sea, when Sarah 
Curran was banished from the garden 
of The Priory. She went away sub- 
missively to the village of Newmarket, 
County Cork, where her father was 
born.- There she was left alone with a 
gentle-mannered Quaker family named 

86 



A LOYAL LOVE 

Penrose. A picturesque hamlet, it lay 
on the border of Kerry, twenty Irish 
miles from the lakes of Killarney. 

In that region there are many es- 
tates of the nobility, and even in that 
day of difficult travel, numbers jour- 
neyed far to see Killarney's fabled 
loveliness. Nothing had been pub- 
lished, but filtering through private 
sources her story became widely 
known, and the most sympathetic at- 
tentions were showered upon her by 
people of distinction. She never re- 
fused these kindnesses, but received 
them all with a gentle abstraction that 
was more pathetic than tears. If left 
alone for very long she fell into a state 
of melancholy. She never recovered 
more than the frailest physical hold 
on life. 



87 



A LOYAL LOVE 

She did not even refuse marriage. 
She tried to fulfill Emmet's wish that 
she should marry and be happy, but 
she was not able even to live. Captain 
Sturgeon of the British Army, a nephew 
of the Marquis of Rockingham, mar- 
ried her, knowing her heart was buried 
with Emmet, but hoping, by his de- 
votion, to rescue her forlorn and fad- 
ing life. He took her away to Sicily 
and to his home in England. Docile 
as a child, she went about with him in 
society. She is described, at this time, 
as having a face spirituelle and color- 
less, in which her dark eyes appeared 
somewhat too large and brilliant, as 
with unshed tears. Her soul an arid 
waste, she was never seen to weep, but 
was lost, for the most part, in sad 
re very. 

88 



CHAPTER XVI 

IN the spring of 1808 Sarah Curran 
died in Kent, of no specific disease, 
but in a gradual decHne, She 
hes to-day in the churchyard in 
Newmarket, on the bank of the Aven- 
dala, a dancing sprite of a river that 
foams down from the wild crags of 
Kerry. Why she should have been 
buried there, among the people of the 
father who had forsaken her, rather 
than in Kent, where she was tenderly 
cherished, is accounted for perhaps by 
her wish to lie in "the land where her 
hero was sleeping." 

Even then all Ireland was Emmet's 

m 

89 



A LOYAL LOVE 

tomb, his memory kept green in the 
heart of a nation. When Moore wrote 
that tribute to her, and "Oh breathe 
not his name" to her lover, Emmet's 
grave was sequestered. But now there 
is a spot that is pointed out as, in all 
probability, his final resting place. It 
is in Glasnevin cemetery, Dublin, Ire- 
land's Westminster. 

Opposite the stone and iron gate 
the lofty shaft of O'Connell's monu- 
ment rises from a thicket of old slabs 
and Celtic crosses. Turning down the 
path to the right, Mangan lies here. 
Griffin there. Anne Devlin has a 
handsome stone setting forth her story. 
The path to it is worn smooth by pil- 
grims, and the mound often bears its 
tribute of flowers. You turn to the 
left between borders of unfading laurel, 

90 



A LOYAL LOVE 

holly and box, around the rear of the 
chapel, past Druid yews that guard 
the approach with a thousand violet 
eyes set like sentinels on the outposts. 

This is the Protestant part of the 
cemetery and is less crowded. Between 
the ivy-draped stone wall and the 
graveled path there is room for a 
giant birch tree, and for a rough slab of 
stone that bears no inscription and 
marks no mound. There, it is be- 
lieved, lies Robert Emmet, under a 
bend in the walk itself, his grave denied 
the right to wear nature's own green 
robe, the spot trodden underfoot un- 
knowingly by thousands who reverence 
his memory. 

So many things left unexplained, 
obscure, in this story! In that last 
scene of all, on the rude scaffold 



91 



A LOYAL LOVE 

raised in The Liberties, there was a 
singular incident that has been the 
subject of many surmises. Another is 
surely admissible. He faced death 
with fortitude and serenity ; but as he 
stood there, blindfolded, a handker- 
chief in hand to be dropped, he twice 
delayed giving the signal. Erect and 
motionless, his head was thrown back 
as if he were lost in some uplifting 
thought. A peasant woman in the 
crowd drew her Connemarra cloak 
over her head and raised the heen — 
that prehistoric, Gaelic wail for the 
dead. Ireland had begun her long 
mourning, but he was unmoved. 

What image was it upon which he 
fixed his mind, if not the most precious 
experience that life had held for him, — 
that walk with Sarah Curran in the 



92 



A LOYAL LOVE 

wild mountain glen, brimming over with 
spring? 

"Are you ready. Mr. Emmet?" 
"Not yet." /: ring running up 
the rocky slopes, the tinkle and splash 
of hill fountains in their ears, the white 
thorns in wondrous bloom and scent, 
and the hermit thrush singing in a de- 
lirium of rapture. 

"Are you ready, Mr. Emmet.^^" 
"Not yet." And surging up from 
her heart to her eyes, oh, immortal 
moment — the miracle of love, at last! 

Memory of memories, to take with 
him, beyond any grave, into eternity. 



93 



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